


Deadlit

by ThePen_IsMightier



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Deadlights, Gen, Minor Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, introspective, wtf is a deadlight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:33:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23917621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThePen_IsMightier/pseuds/ThePen_IsMightier
Summary: For the most part, Beverly Marsh doesn't remember what it was like to be in the Deadlights.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	Deadlit

For the most part, Beverly Marsh doesn't remember what it was like to be in the Deadlights.

There are plenty of other things to think about in the wake of It- the hours they spent wandering through the maze of sewer tunnels, up to their thighs in stinking water she doesn't even want to think about, tired, shocked, desperate. She's can avoid thinking about the Deadlights then because they have more pressing concerns, namely finding their way back to the surface and somehow explaining their absence. They're all in shock, mostly, bumping into each other absently, muttering incoherencies that might be words but are most likely nothing. Her legs feel like lead weights, she can barely hold her head up, it feels like she's been stuffed with cotton. 

But all of these things are ok, because she's not thinking of the Deadlights. She can feel them, certainly, like scum on her skin and muck in her head, but it's more like something physical coating her body than something petrifying in her brain. She can handle a physical intrusion, but she's not sure what she would do if those things were in her brain.

They get out eventually, maybe guided by some instinct or vague remembrance, but most likely through pure luck. The Thing isn't dead, they all know that, but at the very least it's retreated, and they can feel the relief of it in the air. Eddie collapses, not making a single sound, but they all feel it- like some massive weight suddenly sloughed off their shoulders. Ritchie flings himself down next to Eddie and throws his head back, emitting a laugh that is more like a cackle, feels more bitter than triumphant. But then Bill is laughing too, leaning over and resting his hands on his knees, and Stanley is giving off some nervous giggles, Mike is laughing loud and hard, face turned towards the sky, and Ben is chuckling behind his hand. Even Eddie's shoulders are shaking where he lies on the ground, emitting no sound. The fit overtakes Beverly and before she knows it she's on the ground laughing, knees drawn up to her forehead and she closes her eyes and laughs, hysterical, mouth filled with a bitter taste that she knows is Him, is Them, is It. It’s in them now, in her. It will never leave.

They go home, since that’s what’s left to do, and one by one leave Derry. There’s the hand cutting, of course, and the oath, but even as they swear it Beverly is clouded by a feeling of unreality, like everything that just happened was something she read in a book, or was a scene from a particularly vivid movie. The only reason she knows for certain it happened, why it had to be real, was the Deadlights. They were with her then, she knew. She had looked into the Deadlights and come back, only there was no coming back. Not really.

They all knew no one came back from the Deadlights, and yet here she was. They were all happy she was there, of course, she had been engulfed in a group hug that was rib cracking in its desperation as soon as they all felt the threat of imminent death recede, and now it was over they had almost forgotten. The only ones who seemed to remember was Bill, who watched her uneasily, with a dash of fear in those beautiful eyes and Ben, who watched her closely because he loved her. She didn’t want them now, either of them. She just wanted to go home, to shower for as long as she could get away with, to scrub the sewers and the blood and the Deadlights out of her skin.

They hold hands and make promises, and then they scatter to the wind. Beverly is eager to get away, to flee from the place in the ground where she met horrible things in the dark, to escape mind bending terror. Once she’s out of the sight of the boys she runs, sprints, and when she gets home she’s slicked in sweat and can hardly stand. She’s trying to run from the Deadlights, she knows, and though her waking mind rejects it, her sleeping mind knows that she never will.

For the most part, she doesn’t remember.

The Deadlights are more of a feeling than anything else, because they are beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. That’s the point, really. You look into the Deadlights and everything is gone, blown away as cleanly as dust in the wind. Only no, that was too clean an analogy. It was like being ripped apart, shredded so completely there wasn’t anything left of yourself to remember. She doesn’t remember the Deadlights because there is nothing to remember.

But she feels them all the time. 

From that day forward, Beverly Marsh carries the Deadlights with her. She carries them in her smile and in her skin, in the blood that pumps through her veins and in the marrow of her very bones. They hold a tangible weight, something that pushes her down into the earth, leaves an almost physical mark. Some days it feels like she has hundred pound weights strapped to her legs, like someone has put an anvil between her shoulders. These are the worst days though, and most of the time it simply feels as though she is fifty pounds heavier than she should be. The weight is carried mostly in her bones, though sometimes she feels it in her skin and behind her eyes and in her teeth when she grins. She doesn’t mind this much. She’d rather they live in her body than rot in her brain.

Most days she doesn’t feel the Deadlights at all. They’re in her, of course, but as time passes she forgets Derry, forgets Bill and Ben and even It, she forgets that there’s something foreign in her. She feels something, always, but most days doesn’t remember what it is. It’s always with her, waking her in screaming fits on the night she manages to slid into fitful dreams of black and black and ohmigodwhatisthaaAAAAAAAAAAA-

They make her melancholic and drowsy, so uninspired that some days she can’t even get out of bed. She goes to a doctor, eventually, and he writes her a prescription for antidepressants. They work for a small amount of time because of course she’s depressed, why wouldn’t she be, but one day she realizes the small white pills have lost their magic, and she never goes back for more.

(On her worst days, she wants to hurt someone. She’s a small woman, but it doesn’t take bulk to swing a baseball bat at someones head, or to cleave off their hand, and mostly everyone has teeth that can split straight through bone so why not-) Mostly she’s human, but the Deadlights make her feel like she’s something else. Like a human, but two inches to the left. She doesn’t remember what they are, but the Deadlights are more of a feeling than anything else. A thickness on your skin, a sour film over your teeth, a smoothness in your hands. Sometimes the Deadlights make her feel like a predator, something that can spin and crouch and lunge, like she could bite someone’s throat out in the middle of a crowded street and run down the sidewalks with a stranger’s blood running down her face and her clothes, screaming something incoherent with euphoric glee.

Those kinds of thoughts send a thrill down her stomach, but the mostly human part of her never allows the Dead part to do these things. If she did half the things her Dead brain sometimes told her to, she’d have been executed or institutionalized some time ago.

She does drugs, but never anything harder than weed. She’s afraid, straight terrified, that anything harder will open its arms to the Dead part of her and she’ll find herself ripping into someone to feel their warm blood.

She thinks other people can feel the Deadlights sometimes, like they have a radioactive phosphorescence that bleeds right out of her skin. She meets men and of course she’s very pretty, and most of them are enchanted. They flirt and buy her drinks and put their heavy hands high up on her thigh, and she laughs and flirts back and brings them to her room so they can slide their hands up and up and up. This is mostly what happens, but sometimes they’ll make a joke and she’ll laugh, and feel in the line of her grin and the crowns of her teeth that it’s too sharp, and when her eyes meet theirs the joy on their faces die quickly and dreadfully. On those occasions they fumble through an excuse, practically shaking because it is obvious something is wrong, so very very wrong, and flee into the night.

Though she doesn’t know it, Tom Rogan sees something of the Deadness that lives in her skin. It’s part of what attracts him to her, why he pursues her as hard as he does. He can’t put his finger on exactly what it is, but that just makes it more interesting, makes him want to crush it out of her all the more (he never will, and this infuriates him. The Deadlights are not something that can be drawn out of Beverly Marsh, or crushed, or coaxed. You could rip her down to the fabric of what she was, and still you would find the Deadlights). Their relationship is lasting and brutal, and sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night, bloody and bruised, and stares at the softness of his neck, the pulsing veins under rough skin that extend up into his jaw and down to his collarbones. The Deadlights fill her then more than ever, so completely she feels like her eyes must be like lanterns. He wakes up once and sees her like this, and beats her so badly she can’t stand up the next day.

She keeps her deadness tightly in check around Tom Rogan.

The day she gets a call from Mike Hanlon is the day the Deadlights come alive and ride her like she’s a racehorse. Before they were like lead filling her veins, and now she feels like she’s had five shots of espresso washed down with a tablet of ecstasy, like she could blow through a brick wall or run over coals. The Deadlights hurt, they always do, but now it feels like she’s got electricity running through her veins.

When Derry and It are destroyed, Beverly still carries the Deadlights. They are part of her, they always will be, and there is a part of her that will always be dead. She doesn’t remember the Deadlights, and this is why she is still alive. Some way, somehow, her mind was able to forget and come back to itself.

People flinch away from the line of her lips, the sound of her laugh. She hasn’t felt full human since that first day in the sewers below Derry, when Stan was alive and the circle was closed. Sometimes she thinks of him and feels bitter, more angry than anything. "I was the one who saw the Deadlights," She wants to say. "I was the one who was destroyed, and came back. I’m the one who will never be whole again." But Stan is dead, and he was her friend, so she keeps her silence. Bill is the only one who sees them inside of her, she thinks, the only one who wholly remembers and realizes what it means, her look into the Deadlights. It doesn’t matter now.

Leaving with Ben feels like the best thing she’s ever done. He’s beautiful, as he was when they were children, and she thinks she might love him. He looks at her and she thinks he can see something wrong with her eyes, with the shape of her hands. He loves her in spite of these things, and she will never forget that.

Beverly Marsh does not remember what it was like to be in the Deadlights. She doesn’t remember the shape of the thing that destroyed her, the sound of the music that ripped her to shreds. She doesn’t remember how she got back, or what she should be like. She knows only that the human mind has the incredible ability to protect itself from trauma by forgetting, and feels blessed for this gift every day.

She doesn’t remember, but she feels. She feels the pain and the fury and the mind shattering terror, deep in a place she doesn’t touch. There is a part of her that is dead, that will always be dead, screaming hysterically as it is seared in the Deadlights. There is a part of her that was killed that day, and she feels it so deeply it weighs her body down. The Deadlights made themselves a part of her, sunk into her bones and their marrow and into the fabric of what she was. The Deadlights live in her body, infecting her flesh instead of killing her mind. 

Beverly Marsh doesn’t remember what it was like to be in the Deadlights. She hopes she never will.

**Author's Note:**

> Come shout at me on Tumblr @thoughtcloudsilentlyfollows


End file.
